As fans around the world gear up to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death, the author hailed in the west as one of the very greatest writers of all time is set to be commemorated in a more unusual fashion: his classic tragic love story Anna Karenina is to be reworked with added robots.

Small US publisher Quirk Books, which had an unexpected hit with the Bennet-sisters-plus-zombies mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, will publish Android Karenina in June in the US and the UK to mark the centenary of Tolstoy's death. Like its predecessor, it will intersperse the original text of the novel with science fiction action to create "an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel".

Just like the original Anna Karenina, the mash-up version will follow the relationships of Anna and Vronsky, and Levin and Kitty, but rather than 19th-century Russia, these characters live "in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automata, and rudimentary mechanical devices". "When these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology – and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen," Quirk said.

The publisher has a 200,000-copy print run lined up for the novel, co-written by Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters writer Ben H Winters, and high hopes for its success. Despite the glut of similar titles which has flooded the market since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies began the craze last spring – this year will also see publication of Murder at Mansfield Park and the Beatles/zombie mash-up Paul Is Undead – booksellers say the public are still interested in the trend.

"We are still selling these titles well and while the trope will never rival the way Twilight has reintroduced vampires to the reading public, and brought many similar titles into the bestseller lists, it's good fun while it lasts," said Jon Howells at Waterstone's. "And Android Karenina is the funniest title yet."

American poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini, author of The Last Station - a novel about Tolstoy's final days - said the author would have been "horrified by the notion of changing his work in absurd ways for the purposes of amusement". "He was not a man with a sense of humour," Parini said. "In fact, he could be rather grim, as the late essays suggest."

However, Parini hoped that Android Karenina might "prick the interest of a few readers and draw them to the original novel". "There seems to be an audience for this kind of move," he said. "I actually know of one young fellow who read Pride and Prejudice proper after reading the Zombie book. He said to me: 'It was funnier'."